21 Aug Our Dried Up Sex Life
We have been in this relationship for fourteen months now, you and I. I attracted you over cups of tea and imaginings of the places I could take you. I shared with you my aspirations and dreams from my humble home in a small city in central England. I took you with me as I began to live these dreams, we began to see the world. We made love frequently and passionately through Europe, in new places, new positions, I wanted you to know my every new emotion and for you to truly experience how I was feeling, my heart offered to you through my discourse, our intercourse. Lessons about myself learnt through the Middle East were offered honestly with fervour and through Central Asia as we truly became a lived in relationship, I tried to spice things up with new flavours and ideas as the once new and spicy became routine.
We are all guilty of it, the loss of interest, the recession into routine, the lack of desire to summon the energy for what begins to feel a chore and as a master of procrastination I treated our shared time as an extra demand on my ‘precious’ time. It is now almost six months since my hand gently touched yours, since I whispered into your ear words of the things I have seen, the places I have been, the things I have done, since we laid together and I shared with you. For this I apologise.
Sometimes my desire to please you so thoroughly stops me from attempting to do so at all. I don’t want this to become banal and generic, I want you to look forward to our next encounter knowing that we will go our separate ways afterwards enlightened, the world a brighter, more colourful place. I consider our times a responsibility for me to show the beauty of this experience. My life, my world, is so completely overwhelming, wonderful and diverse with every morning that I wake and I wish so longingly that I could pass this to you with every word I write. Maybe sometimes a quick fuck in the car or a grope in the park is all that’s needed and a few brief but sincere paragraphs would suffice. I understand and I will once again try.
This drought in communication aptly if coincidentally came at another poignant time of my growing separation from the person I was when I left home and a true departure from the codes and conventions that we accept for ‘normal’ in the Western world. On crossing the Himalaya I entered a new world, where poverty and basic necessities aren’t addressed, where life and death is played out in the streets, where there are no closed doors for the harsh realities of life to be hidden behind. I have wanted to hate you so much, to hate myself for the needless waste we creatures of leisure create, for the insignificancies that so frustrate us without considering how lucky we are to have such luxury in the first place. If a young girl, a daughter, died on a crowded train would life continue as usual in your country? Is it right that the second richest country in water, in the world, should not be able to provide clean drinking water to its population? No, but we complain about a slow internet connection or an increase in fuel prices. And now I travel through South East Asia through remote areas where people continue to live a life of poverty in rubber plantations and paddy fields, where UXO; unexploded bombs still sit in the ground, filling my camping with fear and ruining the lives of families while Hummers and Mercedes’ are driven around the capital cities. Some things are still so very unbalanced and as I, the white man and face of this inequality, cycle through small villages, I am regularly treated with the love and warmth of a brother. I sometimes feel ashamed to be English, to represent the rich end of this scale of disparity and all its trappings. I realise that I subject myself to poor living, riding a bicycle and sleeping under canvas in order to understand the ‘real’ world that I travel through, but that at any moment there is a phone that I can pick up and fly back to the safety and luxury of my rich life in the West. Such a vast population of the world do not have that privilege.
In the time since our last encounter I have changed, my eyes have changed. My visions connect with my mind. Pedals, wheels and thoughts cycle simultaneously. I can no longer cycle without philosophising, debating and dreaming. When I wrote the ‘Building Convictions’ blog, I really believed I was learning insightful and important lessons, but I now feel that these lessons are becoming me, not just ideas easily forgotten. For now I cannot return to the miles cycled and countries visited, to recount the stories I have not told you, the life changing experiences and lessons learned. They will wait for another day, for discussion over another shared cup of tea on my return many years from now. But I do return to our virtual bedroom, to rekindle the literary spark and to hopefully share these experiences in a way which can bring us closer together.